God-Given Rights

 

An MSNBC guest recently expressed concern over “Christian nationalists” who believe that rights come from God, rather than from Congress or the Supreme Court.

Which of course they do, as explained in the US Declaration of Independence. “Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Leftists here actually make the case for Christian nationalism. They are conceding that America was founded on Christian principles. They are conceding that if you throw out Judeo-Christian ethical monotheism, you are consenting to have governments arbitrarily take away of your rights. 

They simply want this to happen.

Christian Nationalism

 

The image of Jesus Pantocrator--Jesus as rightful king of the world. One of the oldest images of Jesus in existence.

 Many on the left are raising the alarm about “Christian nationalism.” It has apparently now supplanted “white supremacy” as the greatest threat to our freedoms. 

What is Christian nationalism?

Literally, it is the belief that the US, or Canada, is and ought to be a Christian nation.

Horrors?

This is, in the first place, a simple statement of historic and demographic fact.  North American culture is deeply Christian. Anyone before, say, 1960, would see the statement as self-evident. To pretend otherwise is politically motivated historical revisionism.

It is, in the second place, a belief necessarily shared by all Christians that the US and Canada ought to be Christian nations. Any Christian believes Christian values should govern the state. Any Christian believes Jesus Christ is Lord, the rightful ruler of mankind. Non-Christians might or might not agree, but any non-Christian who finds this view problematic is intolerant of Christianity.

In the third place, Great Britain, for example, is constitutionally a Christian nation. While the UK no doubt has its flaws, it is hard to see Britain as a cautionary tale of the tragic consequences of Christian nationalism.

What exactly is the terrifying program of contemporary North American Christian nationalism? According to Wikipedia, “Christian nationalism supports the presence of Christian symbols in the public square, and state patronage for the practice and display of religion, such as Christmas as a national holiday, school prayer, the exhibition of nativity scenes during Christmastide, and the Christian cross on Good Friday.”

Whom does such things harm? Isn’t this all part of our shared culture, even if we are not ourselves Christian? Shouldn’t we celebrate our shared culture? Aren’t we even doing most of that now? 

Striking out or refusing to acknowledge any parts of our culture that are explicitly Christian is not religiously neutral: it is discriminating against Christianity in favour of atheism.

Some will raise the issue of the “separation of church and state.” Yet this phrase and this principle is not in the constitutions of either the US or Canada. It might have been; the framers rejected the idea. It comes from a private letter by Thomas Jefferson. We might think it is a good idea, but we have no right to smuggle it into the national mandate without passing a constitutional amendment. 

I actually agree with Jefferson’s concept; but it does not mean keeping religion out of politics. The separation of church and state work in the same way as the separation of powers within the government, and is important for the same reason. Church and state should be organizationally independent so that they can serve as a check and balance on one another. Churchmen must be free to call out immorality in government, like the Old Testament prophets; at the same time, churches must not exercise government power, because an act imposed by law cannot have moral value.

This does not mean that government should ignore the admonitions of the churches, or the teachings of Christianity, any more than that the executive should ignore the rulings of the Supreme Court.

Given how reasonable the Christian nationalist position is, why is the left so alarmed by it? Why do they see it as an existential threat?

The answer is obvious, and begins with the letter “a.”

They will probably instead raise homosexual rights. No doubt if government listened to Christian principles, gay marriage would go back in the box. But this is not the real reason: it affects few people, and it does not affect them deeply. No: gay marriage was always a feint for not questioning the big “a.”

The fear is that abortion be restricted. “Christian nationalism” is the euphemism. The problem is that by now, too many Americans and Canadians are personally implicated in the crime of abortion to acknowledge that it is a crime.

The term “Christian nationalism” as a euphemism for opposition to abortion is also a lie: abortion is not wrong only because it violates Christian teaching. It also violates Muslim teaching, Jewish teaching, Sikh teaching, Hindu teaching, and Buddhist teaching. It violates liberal teaching, it violates the principles in the Declaration of Independence, and it violates the Golden Rule. 

But Christianity is the obvious scapegoat for morality in general, because it has such a good record of standing up for it.

Which is why we need more Christianity in public life.

Check Your Apple iWatch--Is It 1619?

 

Got any fire water?

One of Xerxes’s correspondents (Xerxes being my anonymous friend the left-wing commentator) writes: “The British importation of enslaved Africans and the treatment of Native Americans by British colonists embedded racism, White Supremacy, and Christian Nationalism as the unholy trinity in the DNA of the United States of America 150 years or more before such a country existed.”

Welcome to the 1619 project and the nonsense peddled now as history.

Leave aside that tiresome and racist cliche “in the DNA.” What strikes me more is anachronism. It reminds me of Whoopi Goldberg insisting that Hitler could not have been a racist because Jews are not black. The term “white supremacy” popped up in print only about 2016. Nobody uses it except the left, as a term of condemnation. If nobody uses it to describe their own beliefs, and the early English settlers in America would not know what it meant, is it sane to use it to describe their opinions? If you are obsessed with skin colour, it does not follow that everybody else is. They were more concerned with your religion than the depth of your tan.

But as to religion, I’ve only started seeing “Christian nationalism” pop up in the last year. Again, it is used only on the left, to tar people they disagree with. I presume it means wanting a nationally established church, as we see in England. Not something anyone advocates even today, in America. Although it also does not seem an especially troublesome idea.

Since many of the early settlers in the US had come to seek religious freedom, because they dissented from the established church in England, calling them “Christian nationalists” is the opposite of the truth.

You might argue that many of them sought to run their governments in the New World on a religious basis. But why is this a problem for anyone? In the context of this new world, anyone who dissented could simply move on and found their own colony on their own principles beyond the next headland. Which is, historically, what they did.

Were they “racists”? The term “race” only developed its modern meaning with Darwin. Before Darwin in The Descent of Man presented man as just another animal, competing with other animals for survival, race was not a thing. Breeding was, true—that is, being well brought up. That had to do with education.

Why did some of the early settlers at least consider it fair game to enslave Africans in the New World? Even though this was against established Christian principles, and would not be tolerated back in England? Not because they thought them an “inferior race.” It was because they considered them uncivilized—not well brought up. They enslaved one another, for one thing. They ate one another, for another. They knew nothing of God or Christian morality or settled agriculture. Buying them, already enslaved, out of Africa was justified as rescuing them from this toxic culture. 

No doubt there was cynicism involved; but having them continue to work as slaves was justified as a process of civilization, which given the continuing influence of parents and cultural traditions was bound to take several generations, and justified as well as supporting the costs of this vast rescue mission. The logic may have been wrong or self-serving, but nobody spoke of “white supremacy.”

The issues in dealing with Native Americans were similarly not racial; neither the Indian nor the settlers thought of themselves or one another in racial terms. In principle and in practice, anyone could join any Indian tribe, be they black, white, blue, Iroquois or Eskimo. The European settlers did not see themselves as a race, but as a community united by religious values. The two groups often intermarried. The issue was that the Indians travelled in gangs like the tribes in the Mad Max movies. The settlers wanted to establish peace and order. They sought to establish governments to protect rights of property and security of the person. Nobody was thinking in terms of “white supremacy.”

We may disagree with their actions, or their attitudes. But we have no right to fight straw men.